Saturday, January 28, 2012

Wait till she notices that yogurt comes in flavors other than "Plain!"

Prego gives us a really disturbing window into this woman's "life" during this sixteen-second ad, doesn't it? I mean, she seems to experience some kind of epiphany when she realizes that there was this other sugar-and-salt laden tomato sauce out there which is slightly less repulsive than Ragu. It causes her to wonder "what other bad choices have I made in my life?"

At this point, Prego could have made this an attention-grabbing, nasty ad more worthy of snark than this one. They could have had this woman flash back to her marriage to that Not Nearly Good Enough Just Like Mom Warned Me jackass who is currently back home, asleep on the sofa, waiting for yet another crummy pasta dinner. They could have shown her imagining her sticky-fingered, screaming spawn and remembering how she picked out the Brand X condoms to save a couple of bucks. There were a lot of possibilities available.

Instead, they give us-- well, to be honest, I'm not at all sure what they give us here. She seems to be having an epileptic fit while wearing a cheerleader's outfit in her bedroom. What does this mean? I have no idea. Maybe it's the bad sound quality. But I doubt it.

So what I DO get out of this ad is this: There's not a whole lot going on in this woman's life. She's in her thirties, and a chance meeting with the Prego vendor has caused a major shift in her life satisfaction quotient. Realizing that Prego tastes slightly better than Ragu convinces her to rethink all of the wrong turns down blind alleys she's made in her life, starting with a decision which had something to do with cheer leading.

If this is a one-shot deal with Prego, I really don't get it. If it turns out to be the first of a series of "Oh the things I could have done, but clouds (and willingness to blindly settle for inferior tomato-based products) got in my way" I DO get it- but I still don't want it.

Not sure you got the point of this ad. The joke is supposed to be on the bad decisions the woman made in her past (specifically the '80s) regarding clothing and hair. Because, you know, it's funny to look back and laugh at the clothes and hair you wore in the past, because gosh, how ignorant were you then that you didn't realize how ridiculous you looked?

Ignoring, of course, the fact that ALL hairstyles and clothing styles tend to look absurd through the lens of hindsight--some more than others, to be sure, but really, about 90% of the absurdity we view in our old clothing and hairdos comes from the fact that we've put so much time and distance between the past and the present, and fashion has so much changed that anything we look at from the past seems silly.

Twenty years from now, today's fashions will look as absurd to us as anything from the '90s or '80s. We just can't see it yet.